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    Ensign Royal
    Ensign Royal
    Ensign Royal
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Ensign Royal

    By J. D. Davies

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    About this ebook

    A rip-roaring historical novella, set four years before Gentleman Captain

    Matthew Quinton, eighteen years old and an ensign in the Royalist Army in exile, is sent by his older brother the Earl of Ravensden into the heart of Oliver Cromwell’s England. Surrounded by enemies, he soon becomes tangled in a dark web of conspiracy…

    Before long Quinton will have his first bloody taste of war, in the Battle of the Dunes, June 1658. In the battle Roundheads and Royalists will fight one another one final time…

    Ensign Royal will appeal to fans of C. S. Forester and Alexander Kent.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanelo Digital Publishing Ltd
    Release dateMay 7, 2018
    ISBN9781788631891
    Ensign Royal
    Author

    J. D. Davies

    J. D. Davies is the prolific author of historical naval adventures. He is also one of the foremost authorities on the seventeenth-century navy, which brings a high level of historical detail to his fiction, namely his Matthew Quinton series. He has written widely on the subject, most recently Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, and won the Samuel Pepys Award in 2009 with Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare, 1649-1689.

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      Book preview

      Ensign Royal - J. D. Davies

      cover-image.jpg

      Ensign Royal

      J. D. Davies

      Canelo

      Cromwell is dead, and risen; and dead again,

      And risen the third time after he was slain

      No wonder! For he’s messenger of Hell:

      And now he buffets us, now posts to tell

      What’s past; and for one more game new counsel takes

      Of his good friend the Devil, who keeps the stakes.

      Will Douglas

      (Contemporary Royalist poet)

      Chapter One

      I never met the Antichrist; but once, I dined upon lamb chops with his son.

      It was in the summer of the year 1709, I think, or ten. I was upon the road north to Ware, intending to investigate some malpractice over wharfage, when my coach was forced into Cheshunt by an unseasonal storm and an impassable road. My men scurried off and duly made arrangements for me to take a meal in one of the more prosperous-looking inns of the place, but reported back to me the landlord’s claim that he had no private room to offer. The one such room that the inn did possess was already occupied, it seemed, by a gentleman who treasured his privacy and was well known — nay, greatly respected - in those notoriously fractious parts.

      I am not generally a rude man, not even in these lessened days when rudeness reigns and my great age inclines me ever more to the condition. Yet I was wet, cold, delayed, and therefore increasingly peevish. Thus I pulled myself from my coach as determinedly as my old limbs would permit, strode into the premises as best I could, and at once accosted the landlord, a bleary, rotund, unshaven creature of nearly the same age as myself. He was apologetic — mightily so, if truth be told, for my name and fame were known even in such an obstreperous fastness as Cheshunt — but he was strangely adamant, too: the one private room was occupied, and the distinguished person within was not to be disturbed upon any account, not even by such an august figure as myself. Soaked and impatient, my voice rose. The denizens of the common room wherein we stood, most of them of the lower orders, eyed us, some with bright-eyed interest in a disputation between their one of their own and one of rather higher station, most with that kind of quizzical half-stare that is unique to the wholly drunk. This was intolerable; to be denied by the increasingly urgent imprecations of this miserable excuse for a landlord, who was seemingly impervious to being threatened with the wrath of the Justices of the Peace for the County of Hertford, the Lord Lieutenant of that same county, the Privy Council of our newly united kingdom, her blessed Majesty Queen Anne — I cannot now remember all the names that I called down upon the rogue —

      At last, and ignoring the landlord’s protests, I made for the door that evidently guarded this so-precious private room and its occupant; for I was convinced that no man of honour could possibly deny another of his station a comfortable table and some good conversation.

      I opened the door with some force. An ancient man, much older than I — and then I must have been in, or nearing, my seventieth year — looked up, startled, from his plate of broth. The most notable thing about him was his nose, which was prodigiously long. He had a pinched mouth, tired eyes and red eyebrows, which sat incongruously beneath his few wisps of white hair. It was a face I could have sworn I had seen before, but could not place where or how —

      ‘Highness,’ the landlord blustered, not to me but to this other — ‘forgive me, but –’

      He cut himself off, appalled by his error. The landlord looked at the ancient man, then at me, then back again.

      ‘Well, then,’ said the man now allotted a title fit only for royalty. The old man looked from me to the landlord, and said to the latter, ‘I think you may leave us now, Gideon.’

      The landlord seemed on the verge of tears. After some moments, he nodded slightly to the ancient, turned and left us.

      There was no-one to name us to each other. Yet the aged creature resolved this awkwardness readily enough. He stood, albeit slowly and with much pain, and said amiably, ‘Gideon is probably the only man alive in England still devoted enough to me to use that address. He was ever loyal to my family, and the old cause.’ His voice, a rasping and breathless whisper, was unplaceable: the slightly precise English of a man who had spent his life putting his past behind him. A man whose much younger image had once adorned placards and broadsheets from Truro to Thurso.

      ‘Sir,’ I said — although to this day I do not know why I permitted him that gesture of deference — ‘sir, permit me to name myself. I am — ‘

      ‘I know very well who you are,’ the ancient said, sitting again and gesturing to me to take the stool opposite him. ‘Gideon described the blazon of arms upon your coach. The arms of Quinton of Ravensden.’

      ‘You have an excellent memory.’

      As he settled back upon his own stool, albeit not without further evident discomfort, the ancient smiled, if a little wanly. ‘There was a time when I had to study the escutcheons of the great families of this land,’ he said. ‘Particularly the arms of those who were then called traitors, as your brother was and as your father had been. And as you, too, were named, as I recall.’ He smiled. ‘Matthew Quinton. A stripling, but a monstrous malignant. You know, I had quite forgotten that phrase for half a century? Strange how your uncalled-for presence brings it back to me.’ He took a mouthful of broth. ‘But your memory is equal to mine, I think. If I know who you are, then I am certain you are equally aware of my name. Thanks in part to Gideon, yes, but I think only in part?’

      I nodded cautiously. ‘I had heard you lived privately in these parts.’

      The long nose dipped. ‘Privately. Aye, that is a word. So privately that most of the world knows of it, or so it seems.’

      Uncertain how to deal with the unique creature before me, I ventured a jest. ‘Perhaps, then, you should not choose to eat in inns where the keeper addresses you royally.’

      The ancient shrugged, and took another spoonful of broth before he ventured a reply. ‘Ah. Well, indeed. That is the truth of it, at bottom, and God’s righteous judgement upon me for venturing forth from my own dwelling, and the atrocious cooking of my own servants, in quest of some edible meat in this place. My father would have condemned me for such ungodly weakness.’

      ‘Sir,’ I said cautiously, ‘I fear that on the matter of your father, you and I might differ.’

      ‘I do not doubt it.’ He seemed sanguine beyond measure. ‘But are not all such differences now dry as dust these fifty years? Will you not then sup with me, Matthew Quinton, erstwhile monstrous malignant? Gideon tells me he has some most excellent chops in the offing. And surely two old men can talk peaceably of the doings of the great Marlborough and those about her blessed majesty Anna Regina — aye, and whatever else consumes the conversation of those beyond the door?’

      I shifted upon the stool. ‘I think, sir, that you are hardly an ordinary man for ordinary conversation.’

      He laughed: an ugly, consumptive laugh that wracked his entire wasted frame with coughing. The laugh of a man soon to be clothed in the burying-shroud. ‘True. Oh Lord, that is truth beyond measure. Not an ordinary man. Yet that is what I was — the most ordinary, the most private of men! And yet fate played that darkest trick on me, to be my father’s son. To be his heir.’

      One is afforded few opportunities to sit down and converse with History itself; and trust me in this, I have done so more times in my inordinately long life than most men ever have the chance to do. One does not refuse those opportunities when they offer themselves. Thus I, Matthew Quinton, born of one of the truest cavalier families in the land, supped upon chops with the son of the King-Killer, the very Antichrist himself, as we cavaliers termed him. Or, to be more punctilious in the matter of introductions than we were that storm-visited day at the inn of Cheshunt, with His Erstwhile Highness Richard Cromwell, once Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland; the second, and to this day the last, common man ever to rule as head of state over these nations.

      Within a half hour, it was easy to understand why Tumbledown Dick’s rule over the British republic had lasted barely six months. He pontificated tediously upon Marlborough, belittling his triumph at Oudenarde, and held forth with all the confidence of a tavern bore upon the politicking of My Lord Bolingbroke and His Grace of Shrewsbury. I, who knew all three men well and was privy to many of their doings, thought it remarkable that a man who had held no public office for a half-century should sermonise so meanly, especially as almost every opinion that the sometime Lord Protector put forward was largely worthless. It was evident to me within a matter of minutes that this was a conventional, limited mind, unable to see beyond the obvious. Perhaps in another life he would have made a tolerably competent schoolmaster, albeit probably prone to merciless goading by the more impudent pupils; or perhaps, if God had been kind, a tedious burgess of some obscure market town, such as the Huntingdon from which he and his dread parent Oliver hailed. Instead, fate — or the whim of his father, which was very much the same thing — decreed that he should be supreme ruler of three nations and commander-in-chief of the mightiest army and navy that England had ever possessed.

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